'Europe, for Example'
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A New Concept of European Federalism LSE ‘Europe in Question ’ Discussion Paper Series ‘Europe, for example’ Simon Glendinning LEQS Paper No. 31/2011 March 2011 Editorial Board Dr. Joan Costa-i-Font Dr. Mareike Kleine Dr. Jonathan White Ms. Katjana Gattermann All views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the LSE. © Simon Glendinning Simon Glendinning ‘Europe, for example’ Simon Glendinning* * European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science Correspondence: Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE Email: [email protected] ‘Europe, for example’ Simon Glendinning ‘Europe, for example’ 1 The Philosopheme The continental philosopher Rodolphe Gasché was once paid the not very friendly tribute of expounding philosophical texts ‘with an undertaker’s gravitas ’. 2 Not very friendly perhaps, but wittily apt. Writing on Derrida at a time when deconstruction seemed to many to be a species of flamboyant literary criticism, Gasché insisted on ‘restoring [deconstruction’s] rigorous meaning against its defenders as well as against those who argue against it’. 3 His mode was a form of precise exegesis and scholarship that maintained itself in relentless opposition to what he perceived as the lightweight indulgence of literary playfulness. His rigour was philosophical, but the jibe against him was that it was of the type “mortis”. Something similar might be felt on reading Gasché’s most recent work, a long study on the theme of Europe in phenomenological thought. 4 Here as before, the accent is on an inquiry that is conducted ‘in as precise a manner as possible’, tackling this ‘philosophical topos’ through a ‘methodologically sound, scholarly investigation’. 5 Gasché wants to champion an approach that would be a model of, as he puts it, ‘“serious”, that is, philosophical discussion’. 6 However, scholarly though it is, sober though it is, passionless or disinterested it is not. Gasché’s “seriousness” takes its 1 Luisa Passerini, Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Intersubjectivity (London: Equinox, 2007), p. 107. Naturally, I could have cited this title from a thousand sources, and this one may even be more problematic than most since Passerini may herself be citing this from another source, since (although there are no quotation marks in the English text) the sentence finishes with a citational reference. I cite this little formula in turn from Louisa Passerini’s text to acknowledge my gratitude to her for her tenacious and passionate engagement with the question of Europe’s identity. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Oisin Keohane for his subtle and thoughtful responses to my own thinking, both here and elsewhere. 2 Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Deconstruction and the Philosophers (The Very Idea)’, in Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994), p. 14. 3 Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the philosophy of reflection (London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 182. 4 Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, Or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 5 Gasché, Europe, Or the Infinite Task , p. 4. 6 Gasché , Tain of the Mirror , p. 1. 1 ‘Europe, for example’ bearings from an intensely critical perception of what passes for scholarship and theoretical judgement in the vicinity of his chosen ‘topos’. In his early work it was certain ‘literary critics’ who felt the full force of his rebuke. As he got underway his writing became suddenly and explosively charged with disdain and contempt, the gloves came off, and Gasché launched against the ‘feeble’ work of those he regarded as both naïve and simplistic. 7 And so it is too with his new ‘study of the evolution of the notion of “Europe” in phenomenological thought’. 8 What he calls the ‘astute’ reader, ‘the philosophically, and especially the phenomenologically, schooled reader’, will understand that such a study is irreducibly concerned with philosophy itself, and with some of its most central issues: ‘universality, rationality, apodicticity, responsibility and world’. 9 However, these issues, bearing as they do on everything ‘shaped by the demand to transcend whatever is particular’ connect equally irreducibly (and with the concept of “Europe” as the leading theme), immediately and inescapably with what Gasché perceives as the utterly inadequate (especially philosophically inadequate) work on Europe that stands in ‘opposition’ to his own inquiry: work that can only conceive these “values” (‘universality, apodicticity, responsibility and world’) as ‘Eurocentric’, and which always insists that ‘European rationalism’ far from transcending its situation ‘is situated, and hence relative…and particular’. 10 Here again, the impetus for Gasché’s discussions seems to be a sense of the profound failure of a currently dominant discourse to do justice to the complexity of issues, in this case concerning ‘the thought of Europe’. 11 The academic reflex of our time on this theme, with its historicism and pan-politicism, calls for a counter discourse that is philosophically and especially phenomenologically informed. Europe is not to be construed simply in terms of ‘the continent and its history’, not simply, then as ‘a geographical and political entity’. 12 On the contrary, for Gasché it is absolutely crucial that we 7 Gasché , Tain of the Mirror , p. 1. 8 Gasché, Europe, Or the Infinite Task , p.5. 9 Gasché, Europe, Or the Infinite Task , p. 4. 10 Gasché, Europe, Or the Infinite Task , p. 8. 11 Gasché, Europe, Or the Infinite Task , p. 9. 12 Gasché, Europe, Or the Infinite Task , p. 16. 2 Simon Glendinning acknowledge, in a rigorous engagement with what we understand by “Europe”, ‘something else as well’. And then, perhaps surprisingly, he also immediately admits ‘one does not exactly know what this is’. 13 This “confession” of not-knowing, so untypical of most academic writings, is in fact a very classically philosophical, especially phenomenological, gesture. Coming reflectively to terms with phenomena that are both (in some way) known and (in some other way) ‘not exactly known’ is the form of clarification that phenomenologically inspired philosophy takes. The starting sense of unclarity in such a case, the not exactly knowing that is at issue here, is one which contrasts sharply with the state of pre-theoretical ignorance that comes before making discoveries or building theories in science, and for the phenomenological philosopher it is precisely this contrast which brings into view the contour of a distinctively philosophical question. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of philosophical questions in his Philosophical Investigations presents St Augustine’s condition of estranged empuzzlement in the face of the question of time (“What is time?”) as paradigmatic. 14 With an explicit rather than merely casual focus on time Augustine confesses that ‘if no one questions me I have no problem; if I am questioned I am at a loss’. 15 ‘This could not be said about a question in natural science’, Wittgenstein notes. 16 Martin Heidegger’s conception of our starting unclarity with respect to the question of Being (“What is the meaning of ‘Being’?”) has a fundamentally similar shape: it concerns something which is, in one way, ‘closest and well known’ but, in another way, ‘the farthest and not known at all’ 17 . Heidegger’s effort at phenomenological clarification is thus oriented towards bringing something that is, as he puts it, in ‘an egregious sense’ ‘hidden’ (note that 13 Gasché, Europe, Or the Infinite Task , p. 16. 14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), §89. It may come as a surprise to see Wittgenstein cited among phenomenological philosophers, but he is recorded as saying as much himself: ‘You could say of my work that it is “phenomenology”’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Recollections of Wittgenstein , ed. Rush Rhees, Oxford: OUP, 1984, p. 116). I defend this way of looking at his work in detail in the opening chapter of Glendinning, In the Name of Phenomenology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 15 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , §89. 16 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , §89. 17 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 69. 3 ‘Europe, for example’ what it is to be hidden in this way, this egregious sense of being hidden, is itself something hidden in the way that philosophical matters for thinking are hidden) into some kind of thematised relief, to “let us see” it in the very way in which it shows itself. 18 Significantly, the Augustinian reference that Wittgenstein draws on to illustrate the sense of something that can be ‘hidden’ both in view of and despite its (unthematised) ‘familiarity’ 19 also belongs to Heidegger’s elaboration of this point, although the issue has (on the face of it) shifted. He (Heidegger) cites Augustine’s avowal of estrangement from his own being: ‘But what is closer to me than myself? Assuredly I labour here and I labour within myself; I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat’. 20 The theme may appear to have changed but the experience of empuzzlement in the face of a question is the same. 21 And something similar should hold, Gasché is claiming, with the question of Europe. Here too there is some sort of unthematised, pre-reflective understanding, something already available that can make it possible to get an investigation underway, but also (we need to avow at the outset) a kind of opacity and non-knowing too, a non-knowing that calls not for new knowledge – whether this would concern (what we think we understand already as) Europe’s accomplishments or its failures, nor even new information concerning (what we think we understand already as) Europe’s ‘location, culture and history’ 22 – but an effort to find one’s way about with a concept or idea concerning which it is not ‘immediately clear to what content such a concept or idea is assigned’.